Oh, I don't mind open ended questions for the very reasons you mean. I just hate THOSE types of open ended "explain to me how you've failed" questions. Heh... my answer is "It's my job to not fail. The biggest crisis I've had as a DBA is a logfile finally consuming all of the harddisk on a system they hadn't given me access to yet on the second day of a new job and the second biggest was when I determined that we were going to run out of harddisk space 6 months ahead of time. The first day was spent filling out paper work and peeing in a cup."

--Jeff Moden"RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for "Row-By-Agonizing-Row".

First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code: Stop thinking about what you want to do to a row... think, instead, of what you want to do to a column."

(play on words) "Just because you CAN do something in T-SQL, doesn't mean you SHOULDN'T."--22 Aug 2013